Sue Feldman gave us some good stuff to consider this morning at Fast Forward 08, some was new to me. Here are just a few highlights.

In the not surprising category:

Like TV, web is fragmenting not consolidating. The long tail is getting better organized. The fact that is happening on TV is the more surprising thing to me than the web version. I am very aware of it and, as someone who does not like mainstream TV, this is a welcome trend. Now how will TV become more interactive and personalized? As the Comcast cable guy and others said yesterday, the TV people are looking hard at this. I still go the big screen of TV for entertainment so I look forward to this.

Users are developing personal neighborhoods – the web is getting more global but the demand is growing for personalized local information. I use the web to find the local guy who will find my broken care window or where to go for brunch in Boston and see all the menus and venues.

More surprising:
2/3 of queries are not going through web search engines – going directly to the sites after you discover them. This made sense after I thought about it (RSS – I assume plays a role here – almost five times as many visitors come to my blog, Portals and KM (or at least subscribe to it through RSS) than come through search. Search brings the new visitors. RSS brings the return visitors.

Baidu – from wikipedia “(Chinese: 百度; pinyin: Bǎidù) (NASDAQ: BIDU) is the leading Chinese search engine that can search websites, audio files, and images. It also has an online collaboratively-built encyclopedia (Baidu Baike), and a searchable keyword-based discussion forums. As of September 07, 2007, it is ranked eighteen in Alexa’s internet rankings. In December, 2007 Baidu became the first company from China to be included in the NASDAQ-100 index. Baidu provides an index of over 740 million web pages, 80 million images, and 10 million multimedia files. “

Baidu is dramatically out performing Google and the other US based search engines in terms of volume. This made sense after I thought about the volume of users. I remember reading in airports in 2002 than Chinese will be the major language on the web by 2007. I guess they were right.

Global Spec - puts parts specs online – charge firms to put their spec online, free for engineer users, have ads, and support forums to discuss the parts. Their web site says: “GlobalSpec is the leading specialized vertical search, information services and e-publishing company serving the engineering, manufacturing and related scientific and technical market segments. The company provides its buy-side users with domain-expert search engines, a broad range of proprietary and aggregated Web-based content and over 57 product-area-specific e-newsletters that help engineers and related professionals perform their key job tasks with the highest levels of accuracy and productivity. GlobalSpec provides its sell-side client base of companies seeking to reach the worldwide engineering audience with highly filtered sales leads, product promotion and brand advertising platforms and a wide range of e-media advertising and marketing services.

GlobalSpec has I/PRO audited Web site traffic, and a global user base of more than 4,000,000 registered users; a user community that continues to grow by more than 80,000 new registrants each month. In addition, the company has acquired 8,500,000 opt-in, online readers of its suite of product-specific e-newsletters that cover the electrical and mechanical engineering products markets, as well as other segments of the electronics, scientific and manufacturing industries. GlobalSpec is increasingly becoming “the place” where the engineering community gathers and conducts business.”

These guys are smart. Anyone who wants to become the place for their niche should look at them.